Abstract

Mnemonic phrases have the potential to help people commit information to memory and may be a valuable aid to education. However, their widespread application is currently limited by the effort and creativity required to generate them manually. This paper describes a method for the automatic generation of effective mnemonics by computer, framing the task as an optimisation problem to be solved by Genetic Algorithms using parser output and n-gram frequencies to evaluate fitness. Grammatical constraints and lexical familiarity are parameters tested for their ability to produce more memorable sentences. The method has been implemented using custom code and existing libraries, and tested, showing promising results on list data of increasing difficulty.